ASSAILING
THE THING
Politics of Space in William Cobbetts Rural Rides

Aruna Krishnamurthy

The interlude between the decline
of Jacobin leadership at the end of the eighteenth century,
and emergence of Chartism in the 1830s occupies an interesting
place in the history of the English working classes. It
is in the early-nineteenth-century moment that we see
the crystallisation of what John Brewer has called an
‘alternative structure of politics’ that changed the shape
of popular radicalism in significant ways. [1] Rather
than the sporadic and spontaneous activism of the eighteenth-century
‘rebellious crowd’, [2]
post-French-Revolution radicals increasingly came to rely
on the ‘independent press’ as a means for disseminating
radical messages. The popularity of radical press among
the working classes encouraged the formation a new, literate
constituency that, unlike the eighteenth-century crowd,
defined ‘natural rights’ and ‘freedom’ within a discursive
and argumentative context. Samuel Bamford, the radical
weaver, shows how the demand for ‘parliamentary reform’
captured the popular imagination of the country in 1816
as the outcome of this new method of radicalism:

At this
time the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of
great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage
hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire,
in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in
many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence
was speedily visible; he directed his readers to the true
cause of their sufferings—misgovernment; and to its proper
corrective—parliamentary reform. Riots soon became scarce,
and from that time they have never obtained their ancient
vogue with the labourers of this country. [3]

The
subaltern version of the ‘society of the text’ that emerged
from London Corresponding Society’s creative adaptation
of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ within the working-man’s
milieu also brought about a significant shift in the identity
of the radical leader. [4]
On the one hand, unlettered working-class heroes such
as Jeremiah Brandeth and Arthur Thistlewood made an attempt
to expand the long-standing, sub-political tradition of
popular protest into an organised movement, but met with
crushing defeat in the absence of coordination and foresight.
While their legacy of popular, but naïve activism raises
interesting questions about ‘organic’ working-class leadership,
[5]
this essay mainly concerns the other spokesman for the
working classes, the middle-class radical or, in the words
of John Belchem and James Epstein, the ‘gentleman leader’.
[6]
In the wake of state-sponsored repression after the French
Revolution, former Jacobin sympathisers such as John Horne
Tooke and ‘Major’ Cartwright became exponents of what
Peter Spence has called ‘Romantic radicalism’, [7] a
political stance that aimed its critique almost exclusively
against the ‘boroughmongering’ Pitt ministry, while acknowledging
the supremacy of the English constitution and Crown. [8]
By replacing Thomas Paine’s vocabulary of ‘principles’
and ‘reason’ with a ‘neo-Harringtonian’ one that stressed
personal morality and civic virtue, the new leadership
also altered the link between the Radical leader and society.
[9]
Where the Jacobin leader John Thelwall employed the Godwinian
and Paineite language of the 1790s to declare humbly that
he was nothing but ‘a part—a little, little member of
the great animal of human society—a papillary nerve upon
one of the extremities’, [10]
the Romantic radical canvassed his personal life, career
and moral authority as the primary argument for Reform.
William Cobbett’s bold, if somewhat exaggerated, claim
in the 1830s ‘that more than a thousand volumes have been
written and published for the sole purpose of impeding
the progress of […] truths that dropped from [his] pen
[…] [and] that [he has] invariably shown that [he] loved
and honoured [his] country, and that [he] preferred its
greatness and happiness far beyond [his] own’ is an index
of this new self-affirmative culture that upheld personal
integrity rather than organised dissent as the answer
to the malaise of corruption. [11]

William
Cobbett has an interesting and unique place within this
new Radical leadership of the early nineteenth century.
Placed within the dialectic of the formation of an ‘organic’
working-class English intellectual, Cobbett occupies an
uneasy role between an earlier Jacobin and later Chartist
leadership. I follow many of Cobbett’s commentators in
studying his life and writings to show how the gentleman
leader’s moral economy cast him in a double role of the
‘demagogue’ and ‘martyr’, [12]
and further, the ways in which that ambivalent role weakened
his radical message. As Belchem and Epstein point out,
Cobbett’s relationship with his working-class community
of ‘chopsticks’, was forged ‘around a mythic unity of
sentiment between high and low: gentleman and people’.
[13] On
the one hand, Cobbett’s interest in the working classes
combined the ‘hagiology’ of radical martyrdom with the
organicism of a farmer-turned-politician model of vivere
civile, [14]
while celebrating the power of the individual/intellectual
who is undaunted by hegemonic processes:

Born in
a farm house, bred up at the plough tail, with a smock-frock
on my back, taking great delight in all the pursuits of
farmers, liking their society, and having amongst them
my most esteemed friends, it is natural that I should
feel, and I do feel, uncommonly anxious to prevent, as
far as I am able, that total ruin that now menaces them.
But, the labourer, was I to have no feeling for him? Was
he not my countryman too? And was I not to feel indignation
against those farmers, who had had the hard-heartedness
to put the bell around [the labourer’s] neck, and thus
wantonly insult and degrade the class to whose toils they
owed their own ease? (Rural Rides I, 91) [15]

But the working-man was to be rescued
from an exploitative system only to be reinstated within
a reformist mandate informed by a ‘politics of nostalgia’.
[16] The
paternal ambition to guide the working classes while feeding
off their huzzahs of approbation fits in neatly with the
agrarian ideal of a society organised around freeholders.
In an age where Chartists were reconfiguring society through
the prism of class inequities, Cobbett and his circle
preferred to idealise an image of ‘Old England’, in which
the worker would be conferred a civic identity hitherto
denied to him, but also controlled by the paternal benevolence
of his superiors. Thus, even while Henry Hunt and other
radical leaders used the support of the ‘lower’ orders
to further their political agendas, they were apprehensive
of granting autonomy to the working classes, a paradox
that also infects Cobbett’s political stance:

If one
could suppose the power of doing what they liked placed
in the hands of the labouring classes; if one could suppose
such a thing as this, which was never yet seen; if one
could suppose anything so monstrous as that of a revolution
that would leave no public authority any where; even in
such a case, it is against nature to suppose, that the
people would come and turn him out of his house and leave
him without food; and yet that they must do to make him,
as a landholder, worse off than he is; or, at least, worse
off than he must be in a very short time. (Rural Rides
I, 198)

Cobbett’s
backward-looking ‘wish to see the poor men of England
what the poor men of England were when [he] was born’
has prompted Raymond Williams to caution us that ‘he could
be a friend in spirit, but he was not on our road’. [17]
One line of inquiry in my essay that emerges out of Williams’s
empathetic, yet critical evaluation of Cobbett as a ‘good
brave old chap, who lived just before modernity’, provides
a fresh context for understanding how Cobbett combined
Thomas Paine’s metacritical method with the moral vocabulary
of civic humanism, in order to generate a style of politics
and political writing that radically conflated the personal
with the political. This analysis borrows from two different,
but related aspects of English history: one, the changing
language of politics during the years when Cobbett was
developing his ideas between Paine and Edmund Burke, and
two, the impact of the French Revolution and its aftermath
upon the construction of English identity. I suggest that
while Cobbett borrows Paine’s radical lexicon for linking
his anti-Whig civic humanism with the cause of the impoverished
worker, his insistence upon the primacy of English traditions
and customs, especially in the aftermath of the French
Revolution, radically alters Paine’s ‘rational’ discourse.
What comes out of this exchange is what I call a ‘physical’
style of narrative that emphasises a ‘common sense’ perspective
based upon an immediate and sensory interaction with the
world. Furthermore, an examination of Cobbett’s writings
from the two contexts described above allows us to reconfigure
his retrospective radicalism in terms of the dialectical
struggles of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘contradictory consciousness’.
In this reading, the radical leader’s fluctuation between
received structures of thought (‘uncritically absorbed’
and interiorised) and the natural desire to transform
the world as a member of a larger community gets dramatised
as a conflict between the opposite demands of ego and
civic selfhood. [18]

The
drama between the conflicting agons of personal vs. political,
or ego vs. civic duty is the defining feature of Rural
Rides that records Cobbett’s journeys through an impoverished
English countryside in a post-Napoleonic era. In Cobbett’s
narrative, autobiography and political economy are one
and the same discourse: enemies of Reform are to be judged
as much by their degree of animosity towards Cobbett and
their knowledge of English grammar, as by their role within
the Whig administration. Yet, an unrestricted mingling
of two disparate modes—a self-centered epic adventure
interwoven with a political agenda of uplifting the English
worker—exerts a strain on Cobbett’s narrative that veers
between two extremities of ethnographic reportage. We
may read Rural Rides to understand how a self-referential
approach can convert every object of encounter into the
evidence of a corrupt system in order to argue for the
moral superiority of the author. [19]
Alternatively, Rural Rides may also be seen as
a narrative in which the personal encounter and the author-as-actor
stance become a tool for revealing Cobbett’s intimate
and extensive knowledge of his community, and thus to
challenge the ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ author-as-spectator
approach of Thomas Malthus and other middle-class ideologues.
The following passage combines the aspects of personal
gratification and political criticism that are typical
of Cobbett’s narrative:

The landlady
sent her son to get me some cream, and he was just such
a chap as I was at his age […] This boy will, I dare say,
perform his part at Billinghurst, or at some place not
far from it. If accident had not shaken me from a similar
scene, how many villains and fools, who have been well
teased and tormented, would have slept in peace at night,
and have fearlessly swaggered about by day! When I look
at this little chap; at his smock-frock, his nailed shoes,
and his clean, plain, coarse shirt, I ask myself, will
anything, I wonder, ever send this chap across the ocean,
to tackle the base, corrupt, perjured Republican Judges
of Pennsylvania? Will this little lively, but, at the
same time, simple boy, ever become the terror of villains
and hypocrites across the Atlantic? (Rural Rides I,
216–17)

We see how the stress on the personal,
rather than an institutional enemy generates a subtext
of ‘radical demonology’ in Cobbett’s discourse, that according
to Kevin Binfield ‘permitted his audience to rethink political
and economic crises in terms of personal conflict rather
than institutional processes’. [20]
And yet, Cobbett’s active role in that scene allows him
to dramatise Radical sentiment by connecting the personal
with the political, where an oppressive system allows
a ‘simple’ and ‘lively’ boy to define his identity as
a challenger of that regime. The full significance of
the collapse between public and private realms in Cobbett’s
narrative is deployed in a tripartite movement: from the
immediate locale of the production of Cobbett’s spatial
practice in early-nineteenth-century England, to an examination
of the synthetic spatial imagination of the narrative
itself to, finally, locating its impact within the larger
context of the formation of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’.

HISTORY
AND HETEROTOPIA IN COBBETTS
CIVIC HUMANISMNoel Thompson’s The
People’s Science (1984) traces Thomas Paine’s influence
in nineteenth-century Britain as a movement away from
an emphasis on the ‘physical’ and phenomenal topoi
of the ‘agrarian radicals’ in working-class journals such
as Political Register and the Black Dwarf,
to a more structural critique that after 1825 addressed
issues of exploitation at an increasingly theoretical
level in Trades Newspaper and other cooperative
press publications. In the triangular locus that surrounded
issues of labour and poverty in the aftermath of the Napoleonic
wars, Cobbett occupies a middle position between the Placian
faction that held state intervention as the cause of evil,
and an emergent socialist discourse that was awakening
to a labour theory of value and saw economic exploitation
as intrinsic to capitalism. Cobbett, whose critique is
more political than economic, distinguishes
himself from classical economists (‘the impudent Scotch
quacks […] crying up the doctrine of Malthus’) and metanarratives
of labour theories by yoking together an older binary
between land/property and labour with a Paineite vocabulary
of ‘natural rights’. In this version of events, the problems
of poverty and unrest (specifically in the countryside)
are seen as the direct outcome of a ‘system’ led by ‘boroughmongers’
and ‘tax-eaters’, that forced labourers into impoverishment.
Following Paine’s analysis of the system of debt and taxation
in Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance
(1796), Cobbett unearths the horrors of rural deracination
and depopulation by chastising the Whig bravado of ‘waust
improvements’ in the countryside. The terms of the critique
are significant as a converging of multiple strands of
economic thought. First, Paine points towards the beginnings
of a structural critique, where a universalist vocabulary
argued for the merits of democratic and labour-based social
order against illogic of a hierarchical, property-based
one. Paine organised his critique through a vocabulary
that focused on ‘principles’ rather than personalities,
and based it on a ‘rational’ enquiry into the validity
of ‘tradition’:

But, after
all, what is this metaphor called a crown, or rather what
is monarchy? Is it a thing, or is it a name, or is it
a fraud? Is it a ‘contrivance of human wisdom,’ or human
craft, to obtain money from a nation under specious pretences?
Is it a thing necessary to a nation? If it is, in what
does that necessity consist, what service does it perform,
what is its business, and what are its merits? (Rural
Rides II, 325)

Like other intellectuals of the
day, Cobbett displays the influence of Paine’s irresistible
metacritical method. Critics have celebrated Cobbett’s
‘Address to Journeymen and Labourers’ (1816) as a significant
step in the direction of ‘rational’ enquiry, where a vocabulary
based on ‘principles’ rather than personalities is paralleled
by the replacement of a detached ‘I’ with the more communal
‘we’, both of which hint at a new kinship between Cobbett
and the working classes. [21]
But, after a promising start, the attempt to locate the
cause of the present deracination, instead of progressing
into an analysis of labour exploitation, remains entirely
within the parliamentary turf of the ‘Pitt system’: ‘As
to the Cause of our present miseries, it is the
enormous amount of the taxes, which the government compels
us to pay for the support of its army, its placemen, its
pensioners, &c. and for the payment of the interest
of its debt’ (‘Address’, p. 438). Just as the cause
of the problem is local, so must the solution be: ‘Thus,
then, it is clear, that it is the weight of the taxes,
under which you are sinking, which has already pressed
so many of you down into the state of paupers, and which
now threatens to deprive many of you of your existence
[…] and you will soon see, that this intolerable weight
has all proceeded from the want of a Parliamentary
Reform’.

In
the process of elevating the labourer to the position
of a civilian with rights (denied by the system) and duties
(to save England from the system by opposing it), Cobbett
falls back upon a civic-humanist model, with the argument
that labour as the creator of value should be awarded
the power of franchise, hitherto given only to property
owners. This version of politics resembles a democratised
neo-Harringtonian ideology of propertied virtue that goes
far back into English intellectual history. The eighteenth-century
revival of neo-Harringtonianism infected writers such
as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, whose trenchant
critique of Whig commercialism took the form of ‘country
versus city’ and ‘land versus money’ polarities. The neo-Harringtonian
ideology of the eighteenth century sought to counter an
‘epistemology of fantasy’ generated by the booms and busts
of a ‘financial revolution’, [22]
by representing the ‘gentleman’s or yeoman’s independence
in land and arms as performing the function of the oikos
in an English or Virginian polis’. [23]
Cobbett transports this ideology of rootedness and land-based
virtue into the rather complex locale of the nineteenth
century, where the debt situation after Waterloo allows
an appropriate homology with the early-eighteenth-century
situation. The ‘Pitt system’ is seen as a threat to the
moral fabric of English society:

This vile
paper-money and funding-system, this system of Dutch descent,
begotten by Bishop Burnett, and born in hell; this system
has turned everything into a gamble. There are hundreds
of men who live by being the agents to carry on gambling
[…] In such a state of things how are you to expect young
men to enter on a course of patient industry? How are
you to expect that they will seek to acquire fortune and
fame by study or by application of any kind? (Rural
Rides I, 261)

Critique
of the ‘funding system’ proceeds from a reference to lost
Arcadia. In this rendering, an opulent and organic agrarian
community bound by tradition and presided over by gentlemen
farmers is threatened by an emergent breed of bourgeoisie
whose interest lies primarily in profit and commodity.
For Cobbett, replacement of land by money initiates ‘unnatural
changes’ that threaten the moral fabric of society. Social
relations are replaced by commodity relations: ‘a resident
native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer
and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with
them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions
are lost, practicing hospitality without ceremony, from
habit and not on calculation’ were fast metamorphosing
into ‘a gentry, only now-and-then residing at all, having
no relish for country delights, foreign in their manners,
distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the
soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of
speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising
them and their pursuits, and relying, for influence, not
upon the good will of the vicinage, but upon the dread
of their power’ (Rural Rides I, 46).

Cobbett’s
distaste for the commodification of land and human relationships
may perhaps be the underlying motivation behind his search
for a new audience, similar to the manner in which an
earlier ‘politics of nostalgia’ saw an alliance between
the working class and aristocracy in the eighteenth century.
In 1816, rather than the middle-class farmer of Cobbett’s
childhood recollections, it is the poverty-stricken labourer
who comes to represent an authentic community outside
the booms and busts of the market. But while the confluence
of neo-Harringtonian rhetoric and Paineite ideas enables
Cobbett to focus his critique of the Whig system through
the lens of the labouring community, his vision is limited
by the ‘agrarian radical’ position that ‘saw labour exploitation
as a product of actions and decisions made with consciously
exploitative intent, i.e. as a product of legislative
or political rather than economic action’. [24]
While democratising neo-Harringtonianism via Paine, Cobbett
also performs a reverse move of appropriating Paine’s
internationalist vision into an English locale, as an
argument for and not against the English
Constitution. When Cobbett brings Paine’s bones back to
England in 1816, he not only suggests a re-inauguration
of Paineite radicalism, but also a reconstruction of Paine’s
identity within a tradition of English nonconformity.
This insistence upon an ‘English’ Paine assumes further
importance in light of the effect of French Revolution
on English self-identity. Among the various ‘fictions’
of the Revolution, David Simpson has identified one dominant
strain within the English response that continues well
into the twentieth century. English debates on the French
Revolution that aligned themselves along a pro-Paine/Jacobin
or a pro-Burke/Loyalist axis were conducted, according
to Simpson, along the lines of French theory vs. English
pragmatism, where the former was held responsible for
the terror and violence generated by the attempt to construct
a society from abstract principles. This myth was serviced
in the construction of an anti-rationalist paradigm, ‘that
identified being “English” with being against theory,
against method, against rules and systems, and in favor
of practicality, tolerance, compromise, and common sense,
all the things that a methodised paradigm most visibly
threatens’. [25]
By conflating a nationalist sentiment with an anti-theory
bias that stressed the solidity of the written constitution,
Cobbett significantly alters Paine’s universalist focus.
Appeals to reason and rational paradigms are carried into
the concrete space of everyday life, symbolised by time-tested
English traditions. Even while embracing the French Revolution
as a spontaneous movement of an oppressed people (a significant
change from the earlier anti-Jacobin rant of Peter
Porcupine), Cobbett contrasts the English legacy of
Constitutionalism with French anarchy of thought and action,
thus furthering arguments for Reform, rather than Revolution:

It was
the misfortune of the French people that they had no great
and settled principles to refer to in their laws or history.
They sallied forth and inflicted vengeance on their oppressors;
but, for want of settled principles, to which to refer,
they fell into confusion; they massacred each other; they
next flew to a military chief to protect them even against
themselves; and the result has been what we too well know.
(‘Address’, p. 455)

At one end of the spectrum, Robespierre
signified the practical threat of an intellectual
project defined outside of history and tradition (and
in this Cobbett differs from the Jacobin response to Robespierre
voiced by Thelwall and Coleridge). [26]
At the other end was the danger of mystification posed
by intellectual activity, where a ‘verbose and obscure’
Adam Smith, ‘population-check parson’ Malthus, and Methodist
preachers deployed ‘cant and affectation’ in order to
hide ‘facts’ from people. Against these two models—Robespierre
and Malthus—Cobbett based his method upon ‘experience’,
in the tradition of the self-styled English yeoman Arthur
Young, who had been ‘too long a farmer to be governed
by any thing but events […] [and had] a constitutional
abhorrence of theory; of all trust in abstract reasoning;
and consequently a reliance merely on experience, in other
words, on events, the only principle worthy of an experimenter.’
[27]
In Cobbett’s narrative, encounter is privileged over theory.
Rather than a statistical approach, knowledge is obtained
by ‘[h]earing what gentlemen, farmers, tradesmen, journeymen,
labourers, women, girls, boys and all have to say; reasoning
with some, laughing with others and observing all that
passes’ (Rural Rides I, 45). During Cobbett’s forays
through an impoverished countryside marked by violence
and repression, the memory of his father who ‘used to
sit at the head of the oak table along with his men, say
grace with them, and cut up the meat and pudding’ (Rural
Rides I, 239) provides a chronotopic ideal with which
to critique the present and map the future.

VOLUME
OVER SURFACE: COBBETTS
PHYSICAL METHODThe descriptive cast of Rural
Rides catalogues all kinds of observable phenomena
with uniform attention. Trivia about cows without horns,
whose black or red spots ranged ‘from the size of a plate
to that of a crown piece’ (Rural Rides I, 8), are
related with the same factual rigour as the story of ‘very
pretty girls […] ragged as colts, and pale as ashes’ who
go about with ‘blue arms and blue lips’ on a cold frosty
day (Rural Rides I, 18). This preference for matter
over abstract categories determines Cobbett’s system of
values even at a sub-political level: fertility of soil
is preferred over picturesque beauty, action rather than
inspiration, sports over schools, sand-hill rather than
Oxford and Cambridge, rootedness over mobility, frugality
against commodity, country vs. city, and so on. Tactility
becomes the synthesising force of Cobbett’s narrative
that argues for the ‘common sense’ perspective of English
customs and traditions in order to challenge Whig economy.
In a passage that remarkably reveals the strengths and
weaknesses of that narrative, Cobbett asserts with his
characteristic self-confidence,

I am convinced
that these fogs are dry clouds, such as those that I saw
on the Hampshire-Downs […] It is the fogs that rise out
of swamps, and other places, full of putrid vegetable
matter, that kill people […] Thus the smell has a great
deal to do with health. There can be no doubt that Butchers
and their wives fatten upon the smell of meat. And this
accounts for the precept of my grandmother, who used to
tell me to bite my bread and smell to my cheese; talk,
much more wise than that of certain old grannies, who
go about England crying up ‘the blessings’ of paper-money,
taxes, and national debts. (Rural Rides I, 2–3)

The preference for tradition over
novelty, based on smell and touch transmutes itself into
the primacy of material over metaphysical, and body over
mind, ‘not “Religious Tracts,” which would, if they could,
make the labourer content with half-starvation, but […]
bread and cheese and beer, being firmly convinced, that
it is the body that wants filling and not the mind’ (Rural
Rides I, 127). Further, the physical space of the
body has an important role in the war against corruption.
Cobbett’s confrontation with a gang of hired thugs is
narrated with a sense of pride and pleasure: ‘I got many
blows in the sides, and, if I had been either a short
or a weak man, I would have been pressed under foot, and
inevitably killed […] I had to fight with my right hand.
I had to strike back-handed’. [28]
At a different level, physical pain and hunger are presented
as unsentimental facts that challenge the intellectual
activity of ‘the metaphysical gentleman’, who, according
to Cobbett, should have ‘a spade put into his hands for
ten days [and be] compelled to dig only just as much as
one of the common labourers at Fulham’, before passing
his judgments (Rural Rides II, 77–78).

For
Cobbett, both the space of the body with its visible tribulations
and the physical topoi of rural England reveal
the spatial practice of the ‘THING’.
Through what James Mulvihill calls ‘the medium of landscape’,
[29]
Cobbett points to locales such as the ‘very anti-Jacobin
Hill’, or, Whitchurch, the site of money production (‘the
curse of England’), as ‘villainous’ participants in the
process of ‘unnatural changes’. Both bad roads and smooth
roads (a ‘real stockjobber’s road’) represent the corruption
of the ‘accursed Pitt system’. At a broader level, the
entire landscape of rural Britain is seen to bear the
marks of a changing political and economic order. Where
a Constable or a Wordsworth might conceive of rural landscape
in picturesque or reflective ways, Cobbett characteristically
fastens on economic issues of production and distribution.
For him,

[i]t is
impossible to be upon this honey-combed hill; upon this
enormous mass of anti-Jacobin expenditure, without seeing
the chalk-cliffs of Calais and the corn-fields of France.
At this season, it is impossible to see those fields without
knowing that the farmers are getting in their corn there
as well as here; and it is impossible to think of that
fact without reflecting, at the same time, on the example
which the farmers of France hold out to the farmers of
England. (Rural Rides I, 315–16)

The under-populated rural landscape
becomes a signifier of an oppressive system. Churches
are devoid of congregation, and a ‘once populous village’
shows ‘indubitable marks of most melancholy decay’ (Rural
Rides II, 176). ‘Unnatural changes’ are responsible
for the destruction of sensus communis: ‘the long
oak-table’, a symbol of rootedness and communal values,
ends up at the ‘bottom of a bridge that some stock-jobber
will stick up over an artificial river in his cockney
garden’ (Rural Rides I, 347). Further, representations
of picturesque beauty that spoke of artifice are dismissed
in one fell stroke: ‘There was a lion’s mouth spouting
out water into the lake, which was so much like the vomiting
of a dog, that I could almost have pitied the poor Lion’
(Rural Rides I, 5).

The
insertion of emaciated workers into the countryside not
only critiques the Whig outlook of utilitarian improvement,
but also threatens to expose picturesque landscapes of
aesthetic and timeless values as ideologically suspect.
Cobbett refuses to uphold aesthetic categories over economic
ones. Thus, he ‘cannot forget’ Lord Abergavenny’s sinecure,
‘received of the public money’, that allows him to buy
his ‘very pretty place’ (Rural Rides I, 286). Landscape
was first and foremost economic, both, as a bearer of
class distinctions through exchangeability and the profit-controlled
exploitation of labour, and also in its productive capacity
within a geological framework of richness or poorness
of soil. Daniel Green reports that only a year before
he died, Cobbett wrote, ‘I have, for my part, no idea
of picturesque beauty separate from fertility
of soil […] if I must have one or the other,
any body may have the picturesque beauty for me’.
[30]
But this bias towards fecundity—once again demonstrating
Cobbett’s preference for a materialist, rather than a
philosophic or aesthetic outlook—is always tied up with
the preservation of community (the girls in the field
are always his standard), an ideal that rescues him from
the disruptive apathy of output-oriented Enclosure movements.

Apart
from defetishising the image of rural labourers, Cobbett’s
intense performative drive can also form a useful context
in which to analyse the Romantic ideal of contemplative
resignation from society and politics. At one level, Cobbett
voices a similar faith in the capacity of the individual
(rather than institutions) celebrated by the Romantics.
But where Wordsworth as an author-as-spectator praises
the sublime beauty of the Lake District and its endowment
of spots of time, in Cobbett we have something of a carnivalesque,
physical engagement with nature that imparts a material
kind of wisdom to the author-as-participant. The ‘sand-hill’
is the topos of Enlightenment where sport meets
education,

the sort
of education; and I am perfectly satisfied that if I had
not received […] that, if I had been brought up a milksop,
with a nursery-maid everlastingly at my heels, I should
have been at this day, as great a fool, as inefficient
a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned
out from Winchester and Westminster School or from any
of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities
[…] (Rural Rides I, 125)

The philosophy of vita activa
is portrayed as a tough moral choice between a practical
obligation towards the community and a desire for retiring
into the lap of nature. While appreciating Sir Thomas
Winnington’s beautiful estate, Cobbett dramatises this
contradictory impulse in the following way:

‘Well
then,’ says the devil of laziness, ‘and could you not
be contented to live here all the rest of your life; and
never again pester yourself with the cursed politics?’
‘Why, I think I have laboured enough. Let others work
now. And such a pretty place for coursing and for hare-hunting
and woodcock shooting […] never, never again to be stifled
with the smoke that from the infernal Wen ascendeth for
ever more, and that every easterly wind brings to choke
me at Kensington!’ The last word of this soliloquy carried
me back, slap, to my own study […] and bade me think of
the complete triumph, that I have yet to enjoy: promised
me the pleasure of seeing a million of trees of my own,
and sown by my own hands this very year. Ah! But the hares
and the pheasants and the wild ducks! Yes, but the delight
of seeing Prosperity Robinson hang his head for shame:
the delight of beholding the tormenting embarrassments
of those who have so long retained crowds of base miscreants
to revile me[…] Yes, but, then, the flowers and the birds
and the sweet air! What, then, shall Canning never again
hear of the ‘reverend and ruptured Ogden!’ […] Oh! God
forbid! Farewell hares and dogs and birds!(Rural
Rides II, 161–62)

This passage voices the multiple
registers of a materialist approach. First, the optimistic
activist critiques the despair of Romantic converts who
buckled under an immense anti-Jacobin drive. Second, the
prospect of picturesque landscape, worked upon by hired
labour, is discarded for a more tangible and unmediated
link with soil and ‘trees of my own’. Finally, the ideal
of civic duty, dramatised as the joy of bullying parliamentarian
villains into submission, gains preference over a secluded
consumption of nature. As a practical counterpart to the
heterogeneous narrative, praxis is dramatised at various
levels, all of which contribute to the basic message of
personal integrity and virtue. As a radical publisher
and reformer Cobbett spent much of his time attending
dinners and making speeches at Radical meetings, some
of which are recorded in the Rural Rides with a
special emphasis on his popularity with the working-class
audience. Further, as a ‘practical radical’ Cobbett builds
upon his agrarian experience to create a subplot within
the narrative of Reform. Once again, not content to be
the author-as-spectator who simply describes a rural landscape
ravaged by the ‘THING’, Cobbett
tells his readers how his straw-plaiting scheme and other
horticultural programmes saved many labouring families
from hunger, and made ‘great additions to the wealth of
the nation, introduced under the name of Cobbett’. [31]
Praxis is also advanced from a personal level of persuasion,
where the speaker’s character is shown to live up to ethical
standards, commensurate with the demands of integrity.
Readers are presented with a second narrative of private
praxis: giving advice to ‘poor assemblage[s] of skin and
bones’; dissuading a crowd from exacting revenge upon
a poor cabbage-stealer; sacrificing bread and cheese to
provide food for the hungry poor; or giving sixpence to
a poor man ‘under the pretence of rewarding him for telling
[him] the way to Thursley, which [Cobbett] knew as well
as he, and which [he] had determined, in [his] own mind,
not to follow’ (Rural Rides II, 24).

SPACES
OF REPRESENTATION AND
REPRESENTATIONS OF SPACEFor modern readers, Rural Rides’
seamlessness presents something of a shock encounter in
the way it recreates a ‘pre-modern’ way of seeing, where
topoi flow into one another, and the space of the
body, physical landscapes, and political events form harmonic,
yet rude counterparts of a unified social ethos. What
is interesting is that while Rural Rides is weakened
by Cobbett’s self-gratificatory demon–martyr binaries,
at the same time, as a narrative that rejects ‘scientific’
and ‘abstract’, albeit ‘objective’ languages, it embodies
a synthetic spatial imagination that radically challenges
the dehumanising effects of a purely ‘speculative’ method.
In other words, though Cobbett’s personality-based civic
humanism shifts (and weakens, one might argue) the Radical
idiom from Jacobin categories of ‘principles’ and ‘rational
enquiry’ towards a more tangible and local, but incomplete,
narrative of personal encounter and praxis, the same preference
for a moral and material economy over abstract calculation
generates a structure of perception that contests the
exclusion of the hungry and emaciated worker within ‘rational’
configurations of space.

Here
it is useful to place Cobbett’s method of personal–political
discourse against three paradigms of ‘rationalism’ that
emerged out of the Enlightenment, as in William Hazlitt’s
analysis of the works of William Godwin, Thomas Malthus,
and Jeremy Bentham provided in Spirit of the Age
(1825). According to Hazlitt, the subversive appeal of
William Godwin’s ‘rational’ Jacobinism in Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) was averted by a different
register of reason as ‘ratiocination’ by Thomas Malthus,
who in his Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798) ‘came forward with the geometrical and arithmetical
ratios in his hands, and held them out to his affrighted
contemporaries as the only means of salvation’. [32]
Further, in Jeremy Bentham’s principle of ‘utility’ that
configured the ‘human mind [as] a map, rather than a picture’,
[33]
Hazlitt saw the creation of what Henri Lefebvre would
later call the ‘abstract space’ of rational society, which
compels subjects ‘to be content to see a space without
conceiving of it, without concentrating discrete perceptions
by means of a mental act, without assembling details into
a whole “reality”, without apprehending contents in terms
of their interrelationships within the containing forms’.
[34]
Cobbett’s narrative critically challenges these three
versions of reason, examined by Hazlitt as the rational
humanism of Godwin, Malthusian instrumental rationalism,
and Bentham’s abstract reasoning. Where Jacobin radicalism’s
‘rational’ and contractual public sphere organised itself
upon the transcendent appeal of ‘principle, glorious principle,
eternal, immutable principle’, [35]
Cobbett’s strategy of immanence was built upon direct
and unmediated encounters within a local field of oppression.
Interestingly, Thomas Malthus (like Cobbett) rejects Godwin’s
‘speculative philosophy’, and prefers a more tangible
approach for ameliorating the condition of the rural worker.
The early chapters of Principle of Population persuade
the reader by deploying the same elements of sympathy
and outrage that we find in Cobbett’s Rural Rides,
as may be seen from the following example:

The sons
and daughters of peasants will not be found such rosy
cherubs in real life as they are described to be in romances.
It cannot fail to be remarked by those who live much in
the country that the sons of labourers are very apt to
be stunted in their growth, and are a long while arriving
at maturity. Boys that you would guess to be fourteen
or fifteen are, upon inquiry, frequently found to be eighteen
or nineteen. And the lads who drive plough, which must
certainly be a healthy exercise, are very rarely seen
with any appearance of calves to their legs: a circumstance
which can only be attributed to a want either of proper
or of sufficient nourishment. [36]

Whereas Malthus’s landscape of
hunger and want is subsumed under a mathematical determination
that Poor Laws ‘diminish both the power and the will to
save among the common people, and […] weaken one of the
strongest incentives to sobriety and industry, and consequently
to happiness’, Cobbett’s encounter with the poverty-stricken
and rebellious worker raises the question, ‘[b]ut, who
is to expect morality in a half-starved man, who is whipped
if he do no work, though he has not, for his whole day’s
food, so much as I and my little boy snapped up in six
or seven minutes upon Stoke-Charity down?’ (Rural Rides
I, 386–87).

As
a narrator, Cobbett actively interacts with his characters
and ends up relativising (or, as Mikhail Bakhtin might
put it, ‘novelising’) not only Malthus’ moral categories,
but also Bentham’s ‘utilitarian’ ones. [37]
Against the disappearance of the political and ideological
subject in Bentham’s abstract concepts of individual ‘pleasure’
or ‘pain’, Cobbett creates a narrative that insists upon
arguing and debating with the reader:

I met
a man going home from work. I asked how he got on? He
said, very badly. I asked him what was the cause of it?
He said the hard times […] ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘they make it
bad for the poor people […]’ ‘They?’ said I, ‘who are
they?’ he was silent. ‘Oh! No, no! My friend,’ said I,
‘it is not they; it is that Accursed Hill that has robbed
you of the supper that you ought to find smoking on the
table when you get home.’ I gave him the price of a pot
of beer, and on I went, leaving the poor dejected assemblage
of skin and bone to wonder at my words. (Rural Rides
I, 83–84)

The threefold challenge is accomplished
by Cobbett’s narrative in two ways. First, the representation
of space in Rural Rides—the rapidly deteriorating
physical and social landscape of England—from the perspective
of the dispossessed worker challenges official descriptions
of ‘waust improvements’ promoted by the Pitt ministry,
and extends Jacobin arguments into the neglected countryside.
But far more significant is the space of representation
in Rural Rides, which is closely linked with Cobbett’s
narrative strategy. While the representation of space
in Rural Rides compels the reader to look out of
the text and respond to the commercial dystopia of England,
the multilayered spaces of representation within the text
create an intricate, interpretive web that allows the
reader to move through various, interconnected facets
of this dystopia, thus overturning Bentham’s method of
fragmentation, which, according to John Stuart Mill, ‘treat[ed]
wholes by separating them into their parts, abstractions
by resolving them into Things, classes and generalities
by distinguishing them into the individuals of which they
are made up; and breaking every question into pieces before
attempting to solve it’. [38]

It
is this double register of Cobbett’s narrative that distinguishes
him from another exponent of a politics of nostalgia in
the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth. On the face
of it, there is a lot in common between Cobbett and Wordsworth:
both careers are marked by a rejection of the French Revolution
and a dislike for speculative, calculative and abstract
rationalism. Both turn towards the countryside to discover
an authentic English community, and indeed we may argue
that both simultaneously elevate and limit the rural worker
within their separate projects. Cobbett’s condescension
towards the deplorable objects of his benevolence is as
suspect as Wordsworth’s representation of the rural worker
in his Lyrical Ballads as someone who is ‘less
under the influence of social vanity’ and therefore an
appropriate voice of a ‘more permanent, and a far more
philosophical language’. [39]
But the insertion of the nineteenth-century reader
shifts the equation in interesting ways. Jon Klancher
points out that much of nineteenth-century writing was
about the ‘making’ of English readers, ‘who developed
awareness of social class as they acquired self-consciousness
as readers’. [40]
The middle-class reader defined him/herself by forming
a ‘philosophy of one’s encounter with the street and the
city, with fashion, with social class, with intellectual
systems and the mind’s own unpredictable acts’. [41]
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads shows how Wordsworth
contributes to the Romantic poet’s work of ‘generalizing
the philosophic, interpreting mind for the active middle
class’, by

[c]hus[ing]
incidents and situations from common life, and relat[ing]
or describ[ing] them, throughout, as far as was possible,
in a selection of language really used by men; and, at
the same time, throw[ing] over them a certain colouring
of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented
to the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above
all, mak[ing] these incidents and situations interesting
by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the
primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards
the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.
[42]

As the middle-class reader moves
through a variety of styles and voices in Lyrical Ballads
in search of ‘beautiful and permanent forms of nature’,
the combination of the humble and the sublime creates
‘a representational language that ‘signifies’ the human
apart from all its social and historical configurations’.
[43]
Thus, potential heteroglossia in Romantic narratives degenerates
into ‘a liberal, comforting pluralism’. [44]
On the other hand, Klancher states that in radical discourse
‘no voice is unsituated; each has a position, an argument,
something to maintain’. [45]
The dialogic aspect of the radical text also shapes a
different kind of reader. Rather than the ‘singular bond
between reader and [Romantic] writer’, the radical reader
becomes an ‘undetachable member of an audience contesting
its position in social and cultural space’. The significance
of Rural Rides lies in the active exchange between
the writer, audience and the worker. Cobbett leads us
into a domain that is at once organic and heteroglossic,
where both writer and reader are always self-consciously
situated within a moral and political economy, and where
the worker’s starving body, Lord Abergavenny’s sinecure,
haystacks on the ‘anti-Jacobin field’, Adam Smith, and
Thomas Malthus are all shown to be seamless counterparts
of the landscape of injustice symbolised by
the Whig ethos.

Friedrich
Engels would walk through the streets of Manchester a
decade later to unearth the workings of political economy
in a different landscape shaped by the Industrial Revolution
in his Condition of the Working Class in England.
Like Cobbett, Engels want to acquire a ‘more than abstract
knowledge’ of the workers, in order to rescue them from
the statistical and official descriptions of ‘blue books’.
[46]
But the mode of encounter takes on a different meaning
in Engels’ proto-modern narrative that attempts to convert
a mass audience of ‘alienated monads’ into the vanguard
of Socialist Revolution. Where Cobbett’s narrative forces
the reader to reach an uneasy compromise between the conflicting
demands of ego and civic duty, Engels’ narrative persuades
and interpellates the reader through a scientific and
objective language exorcised of all personal or subjective
references. Though Cobbett may be guilty of converting
every encounter into an exaggerated and self-referential
narrative, his collapse of the private and public spheres
is morphologically different from that of the ‘bourgeois
public sphere’, whose organising principles of reason
and calculation shun the intuitive and organic relationships
of ‘traditional’ society. [47]
For Lefebvre, any radical program that seeks redress from
capitalism’s ‘rational’ society has to first address the
spatial architectonic of modernity that emerged out of
the Enlightenment’s obsession with measurement and quantification,
represented by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer as the
‘machinery of thought’ and the ‘zeal of laboratory’ that
homogenised people and places, [48]
and by David Harvey as a method of ‘perspectivism’ that
allowed space to be conceived of as ‘usable and malleable’.
[49]
If the production of space in ‘rational’ societies is
dominated by the ‘totality of the visible’, Michel Foucault
reminds us that this modern spatialisation was predicated
upon a ‘double silence: the relative silence of theories,
imaginings, and whatever serves as an obstacle to the
sensible immediate; and the absolute silence of all language
that is anterior to that of the visible’. [50]Against
this double silence I invoke the double significance of
Cobbett’s spatial imagination that too was shaped by a
‘totality of the visible’. Against the silencing of all
that ‘serves as an obstacle to the sensible immediate’,
Cobbett deploys the sanction of tradition and its ideal
of organic selfhood. Against the silencing of ‘all language
anterior to that of the visible’ he develops a dialectical
structure of perception that converts discrete visual
data into the dynamic language of totality, and orients
readers towards a hermeneutic of synthesis.

NOTES1. John
Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession
of George III (Cambridge: CUP, 1976), p. 16.

2. I
borrow this term from E. P. Thompson’s study of popular
radicalism in the early eighteenth century in Customs
in Common (New York: The New Press, 1989). Also see
George Rudê’s exhaustive study on the radicalism of the
crowd in the England in Paris and London in the Eighteenth
Century: Studies in Popular Protest (New York: Viking,
1971).

3. Samuel
Bamford, Passages in the Life of
a Radical (1840–43; Oxford: OUP,
1984), p. 13.

4. In
The Making of the English Reading Audiences,
1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1987), Jon Klancher links the formation
of the ‘public sphere’ with the creation of
a ‘society of the text’, that initiates a
new working-class identity in the late eighteenth
century (see especially, pp. 20–24). Similar
to Klancher’s analysis that links the formation
of a democratic ideal with the formation of
a ‘society of the text’ is Jürgen Habermas’s
connection between the ideal of the ‘republic
of letters’ with the ideal of a free-market
economy, as argued in his Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (1962), trans. Thomas
Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989).

5. Antonio
Gramsci’s idea of the ‘organic’ intellectual
is central to this investigation. According
to Gramsci, against the more liminal figure
of the ‘traditional’ intellectual, the ‘organic’
leader, while sharing the common experience
of a class, is able to organize its members
towards the construction of a new society—Selections
from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
(1948–51), trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971), pp. 5–8. The multiple registers
that would determine the formation of an ‘organic
working-class English intellectual’ reveal
the complexity of that process. That ideal
and unreachable figure provides the evaluative
framework for my essay, which examines one
aspect of that formation in the radicalism
of the middle-class intellectual in the early
nineteenth century. James Epstein has analysed
the applicability and limits of the category
of the ‘organic intellectual’ in the English
working-class context through the figure of
Richard Carlile, who, like other intellectuals
of his time was caught between the pull of
ambition and the interests of his communitysee
Epsteins Bred as a Mechanic: Plebian
Intellectuals and Popular Politics in Early
Nineteenth-Century England, in Intellectuals
and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform,
edd. Leon Fink, Stephen Leonard, and Donald
Reid (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University
Press, 1996). This binary is useful for examining
the middle-class radicals as well.

7. Peter
Spence’s exhaustive analysis of early-nineteenth-century
English radicalism in terms of ‘a romantic
appeal to a organic national identity, epitomized
by the patriarchal monarchy, the apostolic
church, and an historicist constitutional,
legal and moral theory of knowledge’, is key
to understanding the differences of these
gentlemen leaders from their earlier Jacobin
prototype—Birth of Romantic Radicalism:
War, Popular Politics and English Radical
Reformism, 1800–1815 (Aldershot: Scolar
Press, 1996), p. 10.

8. Spence
explains the rise of the ‘romantic radicalism’
as the fallout of the post-French-Revolution
regime of Terror that, in England, gave rise
to ‘a curious coalition between those patriots
who were the heirs of [John] Wilkes and [Thomas]
Paine, and those loyalists whose views were
best expressed by [William] Cobbett’ (p. 198).

9. I
borrow the term ‘civic virtue’ from J. G.
A. Pocock’s seminal analysis of the revival
of pre-capitalist and utopian ideas in capitalist
eighteenth-century England in the form of
a neo-Harringtonian doctrine of propertied
virtue. Pocock’s Politics, Language and
Time (1971; Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1989) and Virtue, Commerce
and History (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), as
well as Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale
(eds.), Feudalism, Capitalism and Beyond
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976) are useful
for a detailed analysis of the neo-Harringtonianism.

11. William Cobbett, Rural
Rides […] with Economical and Political
Observations, 2 vols. (1830; London: Reeves
and Turner, 1908), II, 374. Subsequent references
will be from this edition and given in the
text.

12.
These are E. P. Thompson’s instructive
categories, employed in his discussion of
the role of Henry Hunt and his circle (amongst
them Cobbett) in the making of the working
classes—see his Making of the English Working
Class (London: Vintage, 1966), pp. 603–710.

14. Kevin
Binfield’s analysis of Cobbett’s political
method proposes the twin concepts of ‘hagiology’
and ‘demonology’ as the moral vocabulary of
a ‘radical martyrology’: whereas ‘demonology’
launches an invective against enemies, ‘hagiology’
elevates Cobbett to the status of a ‘moral
guardian’, in a ‘moral drama, or perhaps a
battle, requiring a suitable hero’—‘Demonology,
Ethos, and Community in Cobbett and Shelley’,
in Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press,
ed. Stephen Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1997), pp. 160–61.

15. The
neo-Harringtonian relationship between selfhood
and political activity is based on an Aristotelian
model of ethics, where the two states of vita
activa and vita contemplativa were
mediated by the ideal of vivere civile,
in Pocock’s words, ‘a way of life given over
to civic concerns and the (ultimately political)
activity of citizenship’—The Machiavellian
Moment (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975), p. 56. The philosophic
basis of vivere civile was the conception
that it was in action and production of works
and deeds that life of man rose to the stature
of those universal values that were immanent
in it.

16. This
is Isaac Kramnick’s term, which attempts to
locate the impetus behind an unlikely alliance
between displaced aristocracy that formed
the ‘Bolingbroke Circle’, and dispossessed
workers in the eighteenth century. Though
not an aristocrat, Cobbett carries over this
political strain into a Paineite England.
See Kramnick’s Bolingbroke and his Circle:
Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1968).

18. Gramsci’s notion of
the ‘active man-in-the-mass’ who resolves
his ‘contradictory consciousness’ through
a ‘struggle of political hegemonies […] first
in the ethical field and then in that of politics
proper’ (p. 333), provides a useful model
for studying the intricate combination of
circumstance and aspiration that motivated
middle-class radicals.

19. The
importance of this point is driven home by
Cobbett himself: ‘All my plans in private
life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes,
and thoughts, have this one great object in
view: The overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers.
If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture;
if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever
I do has first in view the destruction
of those infamous tyrants’—Political Register,
14 Aug 1819.

21. Binfield
has situated the ‘Address’ as Cobbett’s decisive
move towards a working-class identification,
referring especially to its opening lines,
beginning ‘Whatever the Pride of rank, of
riches or of scholarship may have induced
some men to believe, or to affect to believe,
the real strength and all the resources of
the country, ever have sprung and ever must
spring, from the labour of its people’—‘Address
to the Journeymen and Labourers of England’,
Political Register 31:18 (1816), 433
(hereafter cited as ‘Address’). Where Binfield
sees in these lines a vindication of the labouring
community that injects narratives of English
nationalism with a subaltern perspective by
both creating and responding to the rise of
class as a presence, I tend to agree with
Williams’s reading: namely, that the ‘Address’
is a model of a process, within which an ‘intense
phase of self-organization and protest by
a still-forming working and labouring class
was intervened in and in part appropriated
by a primarily middle-class reforming movement,
in the interest of small employers’ (p. 17).

22. Pocock’s
instructive term, ‘epistemology of fantasy’,
is an important one that traces an experience
associated with modernity to an eighteenth-century
experience of an ‘epistemology of fantasy’
generated by a market economy. In this model,
‘[b]ooms and busts, bulls and bears, became
the determinants of politics. The value of
public stock, the Dow Jones ratings of the
eighteenth century becomes the index to the
stability of governments, and all this was
seen as placing politics at the mercy of a
self-generated hysteria’—Virtue, Commerce
and History, p. 112. Equally significant
is P. G. M. Dickson’s explanation of the ‘financial
revolution’ of eighteenth century, which followed
the political revolution of 1688: ‘The crucial
steps in the Financial Revolution were the
foundation of the Bank of England and the
institution of National Debt. Individuals
great and small were now encouraged to lend
money to the government and live off the returns
on their capital, thus investing in the future
stability of the Revolution. With these loans
as its security, the government was enabled
to borrow on a yet larger scale and with funds
thus raised to carry out a massive expansion
and perpetuation of the professional army
and navy, together with the civilian bureaucracies
that sustained them and their conquests. It
reached a point of embarking upon enterprises
and contracting loans that could not be paid
off on the security of existing funds, so
that repayment had to be secured upon revenues
to be raised in the future; but war could
not be paid out of public credit alone, and
necessitated a steady rise in taxes, levied
for the most part upon land.’—The Financial
Revolution in England: A Study in the Development
of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 11.

26. Robespierre’s life and
fate was a source of fascination for both
Thelwall and Coleridge: not only did Thelwall
boldly defend Robespierre against those who
saw him as representative of the excesses
of the French Revolution, but he also attempted
to prove that Pitt was a worse statesman than
Robespierre.

31. A survey of Cobbett’s
works reveals an astonishing number and variety
of writings. Apart from political writings,
there are works such as Cottage Economy
(1821–23) and Grammar of the English
Language (1800), which detail his contributions
to gardening, farming and other domestic matters.
Among other achievements he is also responsible
for introducing a new type of locust tree
to England, and a variety of ‘Cobbett’s corn’.

32. William Hazlitt, The
Spirit of the Age (1825; New York: Doubleday,
n.d), p. 135.

34.The Production of
Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 313. David
Harvey’s analysis of the ‘conception of time
and space in the Enlightenment project’ clarifies
the critical leap between nineteenth- and
twentieth-century ‘rational’ configurations
of space, examined by Hazlitt and Lefebvre
respectively—see his The Condition of Postmodernity
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 249–53.
Additionally, Michel Foucault’s critique of
Bentham’s Panopticon project points to the
aspects of isolation, surveillance, and self-regulation
that Lefebvre identifies as the coercive arrangement
of space in modern, capitalist societies,
or what Habermas calls the ‘bourgeois public
sphere’—see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), pp. 200–01.

47. I borrow the categories
of ‘rational’ and ‘traditional’ society
from Habermas, who defines it in the following
way: ‘The expression “traditional society”
refers to the circumstance that the institutional
framework is grounded in the unquestionable
underpinning of legitimation constituted
by efficacy of cultural traditions. This
is the basis for the ‘superiority’ of the
institutional framework, which does not
preclude structural changes adapted to a
potential surplus generated in the economic
system but does preclude critically challenging
the traditional form of legitimation’—Towards
a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science,
and Politics (1968–69), trans. J. J.
Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970),
p. 95. While Cobbett constructs
himself within epic narratives, we may perhaps
contextualise him within a contentious confrontation
between ‘rational’ and ‘traditional’ values
in nineteenth-century Britain. Against the
drive towards a utilitarian and scientific
domination of nature conducted under auspices
of calculative reason, whose full effect
continues to unfold even today, Cobbett
argues fiercely and passionately for the
values of a ‘traditional’ society. In The
Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (especially pp. 45–50), Habermas
identifies the rise the bourgeois public
sphere as the displacement of ‘traditional’
society by ‘rational’ paradigms, with the
creation of a split between public (the
‘rational–critical’ space) and private (the
space of family conjugality and intimacy)
that was simultaneously reproduced in the
altered space of the house (which architecturally
created ‘more room for the individual but
left less room for the family as a whole’),
as well as the rise of the psychological
novel in England in the eighteenth century
(which itself altered the relationships
between the author, the work, and the public,
by creating ‘intimate mutual relationships
between privatized individuals who were
psychologically interested in what was “human”,
in self-knowledge, and in empathy’).

CONTRIBUTOR
DETAILSAruna Krishnamurthy (PhD Florida) is Visiting
Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark College, Portland.
Her work focuses mainly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
British literature, with a special emphasis on the rise of
the working-class intellectual as examined through the lives
and works of key figures such as Stephen Duck, John Thelwall,
William Cobbett, and Frederich Engels. She is also interested
in post-colonial and Anglophone literatures.